The night the Berlin Wall came down, Nov 9, 1989, I was living in New York. I got a phone call around 6pm that night, less than an hour in real time after East German Border guards had received the orders to let DDR citizens travel freely into the West, shortly after 11pm Central European Time. My friend Marlies, a born Berliner now living in New York, was on the other end:
Marlies: Danny! The wall has come down!
Me: Yes I know, the Czechs have made the Wall obsolete.
Marlies: No, Danny. The Wall really has come down! Turn on the news radio. They’re broadcasting live from Berlin!
Let me explain my misunderstanding. Only four of five days earlier the Czech government had declared it would no longer prevent East Germans from passing into West Germany through its borders. With that decision the Iron Curtain had effectively been rendered obsolete. After a summer and autumn of ever growing peaceful but insistent demonstrations at home, and ever more thousands of East Germans flooding into the West German Embassy grounds of Hungary and other East Bloc nations, eventually making their one-way voyage into the West, the Czech government’s refusal to keep East Germans from easily reaching the West via Czechoslovakia effectively neutralized the Wall’s ability to keep the citizens of the DDR from leaving.
That decision was already pretty momentous, and that was what I first thought Marlies was referring to when she called. Because even with the Czech government effectively making the Wall ineffective as a containing barrier, it didn’t occur to me that the DDR government, in its desperation to stem the ever growing flood of its citizens leaving the country, would completely open up the border. But they did, and word spread quickly and within hours thousands and thousands of East Berliners were pouring into West Berlin and the night of dancing on the Wall commenced.
(It could have gone another, horrible way. Weeks earlier, Erich Honecker, then leader of the DDR, had ordered elite troops to move against the growing demonstrations. It would have been a blood bath, but cooler heads prevailed, and Honecker was replaced by his second in command Egon Krenz, who then later gave the order to open the borders.)
Back to my phone call with Marlies. She had just heard about the Wall coming down from a friend in Berlin. I turned on the radio and heard live reports of the celebrations, the dancing on the Wall.
I was amazed. Like I said, even though the Wall had already become ineffective four days earlier, I still hadn’t anticipated this. For someone who was born in West Berlin, who grew up with the Wall as a constant feature in his life, it was as if the structure of the planet had fundamentally changed. Like some sort of a reverse Christopher Columbus. You might as well have told me the Earth was flat. That’s how significantly the Fall of the Wall changed my perspective on the World.
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